Dana Suesse stood tall between the pillars of European classical tradition and the new art form of Jazz. Born Nadine Dana Suesse in 1909 in Kansas City, her talent blazed early, holding her first concert at the age of nine. Soon she was touring through the Midwest and improvising piano pieces for each show -- a regular vaudeville Mozart. She would enchant the audience by asking them to suggest a theme from which she would spontaneously compose a classical refrain.

In 1926 she moved to New York City with her mother in order to be able to study piano with Alexander Siloti, one of the four surviving pupils of Franz Liszt. Exposed in New York to an emerging jazz idiom, she hungrily studied composition with one of George Gershwin's teachers, Rubin Goldmark, and began what would be a lifetime habit of pouring out compositions at a breakneck pace. She was known to compose sitting up in her bed, sheets of music dropping down in a veritable waterfall of musical output. This early work happily careened between classical music and songs influenced by the jazz sound that was spilling out all over New York City.